• Akshay Venkatesh, a renowned Indian-Australian mathematician, is one of the four winners of mathematics’ prestigious Fields Medal, known as the Nobel Prize for math.

• New Delhi born Venkatesh, 36, who is currently teaching at Stanford University, has won the Fields Medal for his profound contributions to an exceptionally broad range of subject in mathematics.

• The Fields medals are awarded every four years to the most promising mathematicians under the age of 40. The prize was inaugurated in 1932 at the request of Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields, who ran the 1924 Mathematics Congress in Toronto. Each winner receives a 15,000 Canadian dollar cash prize. At least two, and preferably four people, are always honoured in the award ceremony.

• The citation for Venkatesh’s medal – awarded at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro – highlights his profound contributions to an exceptionally broad range of subjects in mathematics and his strikingly far-reaching conjectures.

• The other three winners are: Caucher Birkar, a Cambridge University Professor of Iranian-Kurdish origin, Germany’s Peter Scholze, who teaches at the University of Bonn and Alessio Figalli, an Italian mathematician at ETH Zurich.